Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

76 No-ball! Gilkes made little contribution to the rest of the match. In his only innings he was caught and bowled for six, and when Trinidad batted a second time 292 runs behind, he was - for obvious reasons - not called upon to bowl as the visitors, with 287 all out, narrowly failed to avoid an innings defeat. His name does appear on the second innings scorecard, however, as he caught the Trinidad captain A.Cipriani in the slips as he hit out towards the end of the innings: “Cipriani … went out at Pilgrim, the ball twirling into the very safe hands of O.H.Gilkes” (Globe) . The decision of a Trinidad umpire to no-ball a Barbadian bowler in Barbados had clear potential to cause some local upset. It was perhaps for this reason that the Globe ended its match report by acknowledging the good faith of the umpire concerned: “The umpires cannot be accused of being infallible, but we believe that in each judgment delivered they were actuated by a pure conscience and earnest desire to do the right thing.” The first clause of that sentence can perhaps be interpreted as saying that the paper did not necessarily agree that the decision to call Gilkes was correct; but we have no explicit evidence on the point. Neither, unfortunately, have we any description of what it was in Gilkes’s action that might have caused the umpire’s unease. All we have is the knowledge that he had become only the second first-class bowler in the Caribbean to be no-balled because of doubts about his action (the only other was Trinidadian George John - one of Gilkes’s opponents at the Kensington Oval - in 1911) 54 , and the last until 1942. 55 We also have a report in the contemporary Trinidad Guardian which states that it was believed that this was the first time that Gilkes’s action had been called into question. As far as the Trinidad team in Barbados was concerned, his action was not just doubtful but unacceptable; and in response, Barbados again did the right thing by not selecting him for the second match, due to start on 11 February (the day after Gilkes’s match had ended). The Globe reported that “With Mr O.H.Gilkes under the ban of suspicion as a shier and objected to by the Trinidadians, the Barbados team must undergo some changes. It is possible that Mr B.I.Gilkes will take his place …” They got that one right. B.I. for O.H. was the only change in the Barbados eleven, for a match which Barbados again won by an innings, very largely thanks to an innings of 304 not out by Tarilton. 56 B.I.Gilkes justified his selection with a return of four for 83 in Trinidad’s second innings - this return comprising two-thirds of all the wickets he took in his four first- 54 George Simpson-Hayward had also been ‘called’ in a tour match in 1904/05, but this was for a deliberate shy at the batsman’s wicket rather than for any alleged fault in his bowling action. 55 Full details of all instances of bowlers no-balled for throwing can be seen at http://stats.acscricket.com/Records/First_Class/Overall/Bowling/Bowler_ Called_for_throwing.html 56 This was the first double-century, let alone triple, in first-class cricket in the West Indies; the previous highest innings there had been 180 by P.A.Goodman for Barbados against British Guiana in 1908/09. It was also only the fifth triple-century ever scored in first-class cricket outside England, the other four all having been made in Australia. (A.W. ‘Dave’ Nourse made 304 not out in South Africa some six weeks later.)